William S. Sims ( 1 858- 1 936)

Admiral William S. Sims was the commander of American naval forces
in Europe following the American entry into World War I. He eventually
led a force of 75,000 officers and men and 370 ships, with forty-five bases
scattered from Murmansk in northern Russia to Corfu in the eastern
Mediterranean. Sims differed sharply from his army counterpart. General
John Pershing, in his commitment to meet the needs of America's allies and
his willingness to put American forces under British command. Deeply
concerned by such immediate tasks as defeating the threat posed by German
submarine warfare, he promoted the use of the convoy and the deployment
of American destroyers in order to make this device work. His willingness
to view British needs and leadership sympathetically exposed him to
charges that he was excessively pro-British.
Sims was bom in Canada on October 15, 1858. His father, an American
engineer, had married a young Canadian woman from Ontario and then
settled there for over a decade. The Sims family returned permanently to
the United States when William was thirteen. The future admiral graduated
from the United States Naval Academy in 1880, completed a subsequent
two-year cruise, and received his commission in 1882.
Sims distinguished himself both as a gunnery expert and as an outspoken
mid-level officer. His concern about the low standards of armament and
marksmanship on U.S. naval vessels led him to write directly to President
Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 to point out the failings of the American fleet.
He followed this breach of naval etiquette with another in December 1910.
In a speech in London, he pledged that the United States would support
Britain against any serious external threat.
Despite the elements of controversy in his record, Sims moved steadily
upward. At the close of 1916, he was promoted to the rank of rear admiral.
In March 1917, he was serving as president of the Naval War College when
President Woodrow Wilson dispatched him to London to start planning a
coordinated Anglo-American naval effort. The United States declared war
on Germany while Sims was en route to Britain.
The American naval leader soon learned the deadly peril in which the
submarine had placed Great Britain. He became an enthusiastic advocate
of protecting merchant shipping by the use of convoys. And he called upon
the authorities in Washington to provide enough American destroyers for
European waters to help the British make the convoy system effective. His
single-minded devotion to meeting the immediate crisis of the German
offensive in British waters brought him into conflict with other American
naval leaders, notably Admiral William Benson. Benson, the chief of naval
operations, wanted to protect the country against a future offensive by the
German surface fleet in the event Britain was defeated. And in sharp contrast
to Sims, Benson expected postwar clashes with the British navy should it
be victorious. Thus, Benson sought to maintain the security of the United
States by keeping much of the fleet in U.S. waters. Moreover, he was
reluctant to shift America's resources from building battleships and battle
cruisers to producing the smaller ships like destroyers that held center stage
in the war against the submarine.
Named American naval commander in Europe with the rank of vice
admiral, Sims overcame most of Benson's objections, but he predictably
found himself accused of being more concerned with British interests than
with those of his own country. He expressed his exasperation in a letter to
a colleague in the summer of 1917: "Do not assume . . . that I am owned by
the British or any other Admiralty." Nonetheless, Sims's policies gave
ammunition to his critics. For example, he arranged for a division of
American battleships to serve under the command of Admiral David Beatty
as part of the British Grand Fleet.
Sims defended Britain's reluctance to attack submarine bases in 1917
even in the face of criticism from President Wilson. The American admiral
accepted the British argument that the bases were too heavily fortified to
be assaulted successfully. In an even more controversial matter, the British
desire to amalgamate American land forces into the Allied armies, Sims
privately supported the British position. Meanwhile, Pershing opposed the
idea ferociously, calling successfully for the quick creation of an independent
American field army. In the face of British opposition to the
proposal, the admiral was at best lukewarm in arguing for the American
project of placing a vast minefield in the waters between Scotland and
Norway to bar the passage of German submarines.
The determined and controversial American naval commander retained
his command until the close of the war. His position was secured by his
obvious competence and the success of the convoy system he had done so
much to establish. He was promoted to four-star rank in 1919, and he won
the Pulitzer prize in history in 1921 for his account of the war. The Victory
at Sea. Sims retired in 1922, and he died in Boston on September 28, 1936.скачать dle 12.1